Matroid variant of Matiyasevich formula and its application

Abstract

In 1977, Yu. V. Matiyasevich proposed a formula expressing the chromatic polynomial of an arbitrary graph as a linear combination of flow polynomials of subgraphs of the original graph. In this paper, we prove that this representation is a particular case of one (easily verifiable) formula, namely, the representation of the characteristic polynomial of an arbitrary matroid as a linear combination of characteristic polynomials of dual matroids. As an application, we represent the flow polynomial of a complete graph with $n$ vertices as the sum of elementary terms with respect to all partitions of positive integer $n$. Since the growth rate of the number of all partitions is less than exponential, this technique allows us to evaluate the flow polynomial for values of $n\approx 50$. We also get an explicit expression for the characteristic polynomial of the matroid dual to the matroid of the projective geometry over a finite field. We prove, in particular, that major coefficients of all these polynomials coincide with the beginning of the row in the Pascal triangle, whose number equals the quantity of elements in the corresponding matroid. At the end part of the paper, we consider one more approach, which allows us to obtain the same results of application of our main theoren by using properties of the Tutte polynomial and the classical Rota formula for coefficients of the characteristic polynomial of a matroid. In addition, we describe the connection between the matroid variant of the Matiyasevich formula and convolution formulas for Tutte polynomials.